GreenCine | board topic - They say it's not the size, but...

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topic: They say it's not the size, but...

dwhudson

post #21 on December 15, 2002 - 9:00 AM PST
>You never take a day off; you even work at 4:20 AM on a Sunday! Ah, but 4:20 am Pacific time is a perfectly sane 1:20 pm Berlin time! > but this officially puts you over into idol status. Alright, that does it. You're on my Friends List now, buddy. So there. [grin]

dpowers

post #22 on December 16, 2002 - 2:06 AM PST

liquidx wrote:
> How can someone find 500+ movies they would auctually watch? I have troubles finding 10 of em =P <

scary to say, 500 really isn't as big a number as it sounds.

even if you leave out silent pictures, so, starting in 1930, you have 72 years to choose from. that's only 7 movies per year, from all over the world, including television shows -- there are WAY more than 7 really good movies/shows per year.

okay, pick a year, any year. the balls roll down the ramp, 1, 9, 4, 7, okay, 1947, a good year, but not a boom year, outside america, because of war damage. here are six movies i recommend:

Brute Force (directed by Jules DASSIN)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph MANKIEWICZ)
Miracle on 34th Street (George SEATON)
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles CHAPLIN)
Out of the Past (Jacques TOURNEUR)
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro OZU)

and here are 17 i want to see:

Body and Soul (Robert ROSSEN)
Crossfire (Edward DMYTRYK)
Eight Thousand Li of Clouds and Moon (SHI Dongshan)
The Farmer's Daughter (H.C. POTTER)
Forever Amber (Otto PREMINGER)
Gentleman's Agreement (Elia KAZAN)
Germany, Year Zero (Roberto ROSSELLINI)
Hue and Cry (Charles CRICHTON)
In Those Days aka Seven Journeys (Helmut K�UTNER)
King-Size Canary (Tex AVERY)
Lady in the Lake (Robert MONTGOMERY)
Long Live the Mistress (SANG Hu)
Monsieur Vincent (Maurice CLOCHE)
Motion Painting No. 1 (Oskar FISCHINGER)
Odd Man Out (Carol REED)
Pursued (Raoul WALSH)
The Spring River Flows East (CAI Chusheng/ZHENG Junli)

that's just from one year and not a very busy one!!! jump forward 20 years -- 1967 was busier -- 23 i've seen, only 32 to go!

sure, of the 1947 movies, you might not want to see all of them, but i bet 8 or 10 would be worth your time, whatever you're interested in. multiply that by 100 years of cinema (and 50 of television) and "500" isn't just easy, it's selective.

garythegnome

post #23 on December 16, 2002 - 9:18 PM PST
I just broke 100 sometime last week. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I've often had the urge to completely randomize my queue. Or at least completely randomize everything below the top 5 to 10. I've done this manually, but it would be much more fun to just click a button and poof...your entire queue is in a new order.

dpowers

post #24 on December 16, 2002 - 11:03 PM PST
> just click a button and poof...your entire queue is in a new order. < yeah i had a nightmare like that last night....

dpowers

post #25 on February 7, 2003 - 4:24 PM PST
dude. i just hit 1000. congratulations our lucky winner is lisa and the devil! she and it will be carried and trucked a short distance to spend two or three beautiful nights on a desk! WOW!

SRhodes

post #26 on February 9, 2003 - 11:56 AM PST
I'm nearing 1200 which works much better on the newer laptop I'm using at my friend's house now than my old pc. Though I'm not sure how long it will take to get through it (and it will continue to grow faster than I can watch).

dpowers

post #27 on February 9, 2003 - 2:25 PM PST

> I'm nearing 1200 ... Though I'm not sure how long it will take to get through it <

years, here. some of the discs may be dead and gone before it get to them...!

> (and it will continue to grow faster than I can watch). <

what's the point? why do you do it?

i keep trying to stop clicking "rent" but then i think, why avoid it, i want to see the movie, if i see the button in front of me, why do it later.

hneline1

post #28 on February 9, 2003 - 8:53 PM PST

> On February 9, 2003 - 2:25 PM PST DPOWERS wrote:
> ---------------------------------
...
> i keep trying to stop clicking "rent" but then i think, why avoid it, i want to see the movie, if i see the button in front of me, why do it later.
> ---------------------------------

I do the same thing (click "rent" when I see an interesting movie in the catalog), but I cull my rental queue periodically to keep it around 400 -- something like going through my closet and getting rid of stuff that I haven't worn in three years. Dunno, maybe it's just that I juggle my list often enough and 400 is the psychological limit of my prioritization abilities. ;-p

BTW, it's almost coming up to One Whole Year from the time we started mailing out physical DVDs during our beta testing period. Before that, we were emailing our alpha and beta testers to simulate DVDs being sent and they would email us back to simulate DVDs being returned. I'm sure some of our old-timers will remember those horrid plastic envelopes that we used during our first mailings until we got the specialized envelopes.... :-)

And based on my own wacked almost-one-year experience, I've been able to go through 230+ DVDs at GC (and, believe it or not, I'm NOT the top renter). So DPowers, you only have 4 years of movies in your rental queue -- I think you should keep adding more because, otherwise, what will you do after 4 years? ;-p ;-p ;-p

dpowers

post #29 on February 9, 2003 - 10:20 PM PST

> I do the same thing (click "rent" when I see an interesting movie in the catalog), but I cull my rental queue periodically to keep it around 400 <

so my big thing was, somewhere around 700, i went through and methodically rearranged the whole queue so that there were anime or TV serial episodes at every third slot. and, AND!! i counted out the episodes of every long series and made sure each disc of a set was 12 spots apart from the previous volume.

that's insane, right? though it went relatively quickly, and now, brainless entertainment shows up regularly, in order, it's great.

as for the rest of it. i'm a database programmer in spirit i guess since i haven't done that work in a while, but i do have myself a nice-if-useless database of all the movies i've seen since 1998 and all the movies i want to see. around the time i rearranged the queue, i set up the database to generate random numbers for each title, based on the size of the GC queue. plug that number into the queue form, update, and presto, the heavy stuff is shuffled, and the light stuff is pretty regularly spread out.

> Dunno, maybe it's just that I juggle my list often enough and 400 is the psychological limit of my prioritization abilities. ;-p <

you have a big brain. i think i could handle 100 before getting tired (which i would pretend was boredom).

> BTW, it's almost coming up to One Whole Year <

send out pieces of cake with the DVDs!

> I think you should keep adding more because, otherwise, what will you do after 4 years? <

dpowers

post #30 on February 9, 2003 - 10:22 PM PST
i have four years of movies in my queue? okay i'm vacating. see you in january '04.

SRhodes

post #31 on February 10, 2003 - 5:01 PM PST
I add them (usually from the new to greencine section) because I'm afraid I'll forget a film I want to see if it isn't there, but it is getting hard to manage. I can't seeem to see where a complete list of DVDs I've received is. On my shipping status page, it just goes back to November (roughly 40 DVDs).

dpowers

post #32 on February 10, 2003 - 5:55 PM PST

> On my shipping status page, it just goes back to November (roughly 40 DVDs). <

i read somewhere, in a message maybe, that there's no complete history available right now. the shipping history is up as some kind of visual aid for mail problem-solving.

but i bet the computers remember somewhere what we've rented, right? (so the pentagon can track it... ^_^ ) maybe there could be a "more..." link at the bottom of that list for the very meticulous.

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